Last night while watching TV (Reaper), I was surprised to see another Mac ad with the balding bland old guy as the PC and the young “hip” kid as the Mac. I was preparing to change the channel or at least mute when I noticed a block of small print at the bottom. It was then that I started to listen to possible the most misleading commercial from Apple I have ever had to witness.
The ad follows the same lines as the rest in the series; the young, cool casual, hip Mac says hi and then the old, geeky, fat, balding PC says he is an incredibly easy to use PC. As soon as he says that the small print pops up. The Mac points this out and the PC explains that it is “Legal Copy” as “Saying I am much more simple and intuitive than you Mac requires a little explanation”
Again more legal copy pops up, again the cool Mac points this out and the PC says “you see usually PCs require a lot of regular maintenance, downloading security patches, virus scans” Here is where the misleading part comes in. Although they never openly say that you never have to update a Mac it is implied that Macs do not need these patches.
This is interesting considering the fact that there were more patches for security flaws in OSX that there were for Windows Vista in the last year. Apple is also unusually slow to fix threats presented to them and even they now recommend an Anti-Virus application despite still advertising that they are not affected by them just look at the new “biohazard suit” ad. OSX is also the fastest OS to hack according to the Pwn2own completion where Apple falls first and fastest each year. We should also mention that Vista was not even hacked; the rules at pwn2own were changed so that a third party application exploit was allowed [Adobe Flash] while the exploit for the Mac was the ever popular Safari and simple javascript.
As Apple fanboys line up to attack and criticize the new Windows Commercials Apple sits back and runs very misleading and borderline false ads for the consumer. I wonder where the rest of the press will be on this one. It is really becoming harder and harder for the press to claim objectivity when they allow Apple to push ads like this without comment but jump on Microsoft for every little detail. I suppose this was bound to happen though since Microsoft's sucess with the new Laptop Hunters campaign Apple has to strike back somehow.
